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Afterlife Forums is an online, interactive community designed to give seekers direct access to prominent researchers, to afterlife literature, and to one another in order to foster both spiritual growth and public interest in life after death.

Intro

Roberta, thank you for the video links. I've watched a couple of them before. In fact, I've had my students watch one of them. I'd also point out that the materialist dogma does back a lot farther than the last century. Some of the ancient philosophers, such as Epicurus and Lucretius, were making the same case. And I wouldn't say that Planck's views have been ignored, but they have been resisted. There have been many attempts to get consciousness out of the quantum mechanical picture. It all comes down to what counts as a "measurement", and this is still a disputed point. Personally, I hold a view similar to yours (I think), which is that all attempts to conceive of measurement without consciousness ultimately fail, but I claim no expertise in the matter.

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Materialism goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, but it was only in the first years of the 20th century that mainstream science began to enforce it via peer-reviewed journals and university departments. It was only then that you could no longer be a legitimate scientist and research anything that could not be reduced to materiality in some fashion.

And everyone, please understand that it is this arbitrary decision that reality must be material that is the only reason why people who insist that consciousness must be material even can come up with a reasoned argument for their positions! "How can you see if you don't have eyes?" is, for example, a ludicrous and specious argument; it's not even an argument at all. Those of us whose minds are more open and who actually have examined all the evidence know that the dead have been telling us for more than a century that in the afterlife our vision is nearly 360 degrees, and it is so much better that they can see every leaf on every tree on foothills that appear to be 50 miles away (that's a nearly direct quote from a man who died 100 years ago and was nearly blind in life; he was asked by one of his loved ones if he could see better now). It's called mind-sight. And mind-hearing is comparable! Mind-sight and mind-hearing have been demonstrated so often, during NDEs and at other times, that the fact that mainstream scientists are so incurious about these phenomena renders absurd their entire discipline.

In every argument these supposed scientists make, they spout such nonsense and in their little materialist world they get away with it because their materialist dogma allows (indeed, requires) that they ignore a good part of the evidence. Think about this for a minute! They are investigating consciousness, for heaven's sake. You can't measure it, weigh it, put it in a beaker. So you can call it "material" only if you can demonstrate that it arises from a material brain, but of course that is the very thing that they never have been able even to begin to understand. So to be able to talk about consciousness at all, they get around the "hard problem" by simply assuming (but never demonstrating) the spurious conclusion that consciousness arises from the brain, and then they use their spurious conclusion as one of their tools for solving the "hard problem." They assume the conclusion, then base their further research on that assumption! And this is supposed to be science??

There is a deeper problem, identified by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, namely that we don't have any real understanding of what matter is anyway, or what its fundamental properties are. We are therefore not in a position to say what kinds of phenomena matter can and cannot give rise to. This is precisely the point that the new generation of panpsychists are starting with.

There is a deeper problem, identified by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, namely that we don't have any real understanding of what matter is anyway, or what its fundamental properties are. We are therefore not in a position to say what kinds of phenomena matter can and cannot give rise to. This is precisely the point that the new generation of panpsychists are starting with.

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There are no good arguments that can be made for materialism, simply because it IS an "- ism"! It's a supposition. A dogma. A basis for a belief-system. It is supposed to be in the very nature of science that nothing ever is quite proven! Even gravity is a theory, no matter how many apples might have fallen on Newton's head. Materialism supposes a whole world of things - espeially including time - that must be taken as givens, but frustratingly never can be well understood because that basic supposition - materialism itself - must forever remain a mere supposition.

As I have said elsewhere, I love Scientific American and I learn a lot from it, but I see it as for now still a humor magazine. Over and over, in probably every issue, I see physicists trying to solve problems (the source of ambient light in the universe; the composition of dark matter; etc.) and coming up against walls created by their own dogma-based prejudices. Occasionally someone even will say something like, "perhaps we will need to reconsider our basic premise" or "maybe our model is wrong after all" (they never call it a "dogma" now, but from the context it is clear that materialism is their problem). To be frank, either you are open-mindedly seeking the truth based upon all the evidence, or you are not! And to even give mind-space to questions like what kinds of things matter can give rise to when they haven't yet figured out what matter even is makes no sense. But they all do it now! They closed-mindedly beg the most basic questions so they can go on and try to answer the other, more interesting questions that they prefer. This kind of nonsensical inquiry is not science. And it leads nowhere!

There are no good arguments that can be made for materialism, simply because it IS an "- ism"! It's a supposition. A dogma. A basis for a belief-system. It is supposed to be in the very nature of science that nothing ever is quite proven!

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We can't think about anything at all without suppositions. It's also impossible to have beliefs without belief-systems, because beliefs are not atoms that have no connection with each other. Suppositions only become dogmas when they are not allowed to be questioned. I tend to agree that materialism has been elevated to the status of a dogma.

And to even give mind-space to questions like what kinds of things matter can give rise to when they haven't yet figured out what matter even is makes no sense. But they all do it now! They closed-mindedly beg the most basic questions so they can go on and try to answer the other, more interesting questions that they prefer. This kind of nonsensical inquiry is not science. And it leads nowhere!

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If scientists had to first solve the basic metaphysical questions at issue they would never be able to do any science. It would be nice if more of them were more alert to the fact that they are indulging in metaphysics, but what you ask for seems impossible.